Three Stories My Mother Tells That Make Me Shriek

ONE

It is roughly 1990. We are living in Hong Kong. My mother wakes up in the middle of the night to nurse my baby brother and sister, as people with recently born infants often do. She is sitting up in bed, in the dark. She is breastfeeding Luke. She feels a weird....feeling on her left shoulder, just below her collarbone. It's like something is brushing up against her skin. Oh, she thinks, it's my necklace. Then: wait, she thinks. I'm not wearing a necklace. She puts her hand to her neck and cups it around an enormous cockroach. She screams bloody murder. She turns the light on. The cockroach is at least four inches long. My dad runs in, certain she is being decapitated or garotted or something equally as gruesome. "COCKROACH!" she shouts. "Oh, thank god," says my dad. "I thought there was something wrong with the baby."

TWO

It is roughly 2000. We are living in Connecticut. My mother is in the bathroom, looking for some eyedrops. She has taken her contact lenses out, can't see a thing. She finds the eye drops, tips her head back, raises the tiny bottle to her face. At the very last second she catches an unfamiliar word or font or color on the bottle. She stops herself, brings it closer, reads the label. NAIL GLUE, it says. Close call.

THREE

It is roughly 1983. We are living in Paris. My parents have a china cabinet and my mother wants to move it from one end of the living room to the other. The china cabinet is full of everything fancy and expensive and breakable that my parents own: Waterford, Wedgwood, wedding presents that they have kept intact for almost a decade. My father rigs an elaborate system of rollers to transport the china cabinet from one end of the living room to the other. The plan is simple: he will place these rollers underneath the china cabinet, then push the china cabinet gently until it glides to its destination. He will do this carefully, he swears. The Waterford and the Wedgwood will be fine.

My brother Tom, just a few months old, is sitting in a basket on the living room floor. "Mind the baby!" cries my mother, as my father rolls the china cabinet blindly towards him. She dives in, grabs his basket, whips it away from the china cabinet as the china cabinet begins to wobble. My parents stare at it, a split-second of panic, and then it crashes down spectacularly to the floor. It is face-first. Of course it is face-first. There is shattered glass and china and crystal everywhere. My mother and father do not speak to each other (I imagine) for days. They cannot speak of the incident for years.

A long time later, I find a polaroid taken in the aftermath, my dad impossibly young and sheepish in a hoodie. He is standing in the middle of the smashed detritus, a look on his face like he is about to cry. I am over to the left, age three, inexplicably wearing no pants. On the bottom of the Polaroid, in my mother's handwriting, a line has been scrawled: "1983. The Crash."